I tried even harder.
Three
Seven Years Ago
Age Sixteen
She showed up out of nowhere.
Too clichéd? You didn’t see what I did: a girl limping out of the darkness and collapsing like a ghost, just outside the pool of light from the stables on our ranch.
We’d spent the entire season there. My cousin Wes loved asking me, “How’s it been, summering in the North Dakota splendor?” with the same posh, bullshit affect with which his mother spoke. Of all the Durham siblings, my aunt Billie fit best into the upper crust. Theo’s dad was a close second.
But, for whatever reason, Sterling Durham always seemed to struggle with wealth. Whether managing the old family grocery store upstate or prop trading on Wall Street, Dad just didn’t know how to enjoy payday.
He wanted a simple life, or so he claimed, which was why he and mom bought the ranch in the first place.
I liked it as a kid. Tearing down the oil-painting fields on my very own horse, Captain, was as close to heaven as I could get. The sprawling farmhouse, tranquil swimming hole, and tiny town nearby that my parents couldn’t get enough of? Absolutely nothing, compared to saddling up and taking off.
North Dakota was also where I first learned all-terrain skating. Charging straight into a sunset on Cap’s back had the same feeling as hitting a jump just right. Gravity stopped applying. You weren’t a mere mortal, anymore.
That summer brought my father another nervous breakdown he couldn’t admit to, so I suggested a father-son trip to New Zealand. It was part selfishness—boarding was out of this world, down there—but at least a little genuine, because our last trip had seriously reinvigorated him. Far better than all the therapy, antidepressants, and wheat-grass concoctions he’d tried since Mom’s death, that was for sure.
“New Zealand?” he’d asked, snapping out of a trance. He looked around our Manhattan penthouse as though I’d built the entire thing while he wasn’t paying attention.
“Yeah. Why not?”
We were the same height now. Sitting with him at the glass dining table, I scrunched myself up until I felt smaller, like I needed to remind him he was the adult, here. I was tired of him forgetting.
“You know,” I went on, appealing to his inner woodsman, “fresh air? Nature? Getting back to simpler things?”
My plan backfired right in my face. Instead of New Zealand, Dad hauled us to the old ranch for the summer. “This was a great idea, Van,” he kept telling me, as he took in deep, gnat-filled lungfuls of the fresh air, nature, and simple things that bored me to tears.
That summer had been long and languid and duller than the dirt where nothing grew. It was early August when Juniper showed up, a late night when I was on my computer in the empty stables. It was the only place I knew Dad wouldn’t visit. Horses were mine and Mom’s thing.
The horses were long auctioned off, including Captain. I’d heard he passed away recently, along with a few of Mom’s favorites, but I didn’t feel sad about it. Nothing made me sad, anymore.
I figured something in me had broken, because I couldn’t feel any other emotion, either. The one shrink I’d agreed to visit at thirteen called it shock. Said it would pass.
Three years later, here I was. Numb as ever.
But seeing Juniper that night, I felt the first strong emotion my busted heart had pumped out in years. Pure, undiluted fear.
“Holy shit,” I gasped. The ghosts of all those horses stampeded right through my chest.
She didn’t look human.
It was the way she’d fallen. Like a leaf from a tree, airy and glowing. A wisp into the dirt.
My logic kicked in when I stepped out of the stables and squinted through the darkness, finding her face. She had deep purple circles under both eyes, a cut on her cheek, and light hair matted with blood.
Her chest rose and fell slowly, stuttering through each breath. Her legs were battered and bloody too, and her arms were sliced up under the sleeves of some weird, shapeless linen dress.
Yes, she was human. Bizarrely ethereal, looking like a time traveler fallen right from the stars—but a living, real person even my dumbfounded brain couldn’t mistake.
“Dad!” I screamed, only partially aware that I was tearing apart my T-shirt to dress her wounds.
When Dad and Howard showed up with the First Aid kit from our hall closet, I felt stupid. Of course a sweaty shirt wasn’t necessary, or even wise, to help this girl.
It was all I’d been able to do, though: treat her using whatever I had, right that second, like I’d traveled back in time myself.
The entire night had that same dream-like quality to it, even in the hospital with all the buzzing modern technology. I wore an oil-stained flannel from the truck and waited with Dad and Howard for news.
“Do they know where she’s from?” I asked, ignoring the antiseptic smell that still made me remember Mom. I hated that all her candles and hints of perfume, embedded in every textile of our apartment, didn’t do that anymore. Not like this smell did.
And I didn’t even know why. Mom didn’t die in a hospital. That was just where the news finally hit me: after it was way too late.
Maybe that’s where my emotions went. Maybe all my old feelings haunted that New York emergency room like the horses’ spirits still lingered in our stables.
Dad let out a long breath through his lips. “She’s not awake yet, but they’re guessing she was a runaway.”
That, I could believe. She’d collapsed the way only a person fleeing something horrible could.
“We don’t have to stay, you know.” Dad eyed me with the tiptoe caution you’d give a guy with a bomb strapped to his chest. “She’s stabilized. And when she’s awake, I’m sure they can find out her name, contact her family....”
“I want to stay.” Hospitals got to both of us, but I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving. I needed to know this girl’s name.
I needed to see her eyes open for myself.
“We probably can’t help her, Van,” Howard said gently. He was part Lakota, with jet-black Fabio hair and shots of silver near his temples, and a voice that sat like silk in the creases of your brain. Dad hired him to oversee the ranch when we were gone. He felt like an uncle to me, alternately encouraging my mischief and scolding my stupidity.
I got the feeling he was doing the latter right now.
“Why can’t we help her?”
“She’ll go into the system after this, if she doesn’t have any family.” Howard glanced at Dad and shrugged. “She can’t be older than, what...fourteen, fifteen?”
“Hard to tell. Felt like scooping up a baby bird, she was so light.”
“You shouldn’t have moved her.” I tented my hands in front of my face and breathed hard against them. My lungs worked overtime, like a dog panting at a gate.
That’s what I felt like: a dog. Cerberus, maybe, or Laelaps. Some fearsome guard dog too dumbly enraged for my own good, hell-bent on protecting my newest find. Even if it wasn’t mine.
Why did I get so angry when my dad picked her up? Why, when he tore out of my grasp and shouted at me that an ambulance would take too long, did my common sense take a backseat?
Why did I climb into the truck with them, taking the actual backseat so I could have her head in my lap as we thundered to the road, and feel my heart thaw just one tiny bit every time she moved?
“It was either risk making her injuries worse,” Howard told me, sipping his stale coffee again, “or let her bleed out waiting for the ambulance. We did what was best for her, Van.”
“Her wrist looked broken.” Dad sat back and folded his arms tightly over his chest, like holding in all his organs. “And her knee and ankle? God, they were so swollen I can’t believe she ran on them.”
“Miracle,” Howard nodded, with another gulp of coffee.
She was a miracle.
That tiny little thing, that wisp, had made me feel something again. Fully, truly feel it. Who car
ed if it was fear? It was real.
And now there was this fierce protectiveness in my gut, and desperate hope that her eyes would open. Two more things I hadn’t felt in years, now stronger than I’d ever felt them before.
Whatever part of me broke the day Mom died, I knew this girl had just fixed it. I didn’t know how, didn’t care—but I wasn’t going to let go of that miracle.
When she woke, it was late morning the next day. None of us had slept.
Juniper Summers. That was the name she kept giving, even when doctors called bullshit because no records from her birth year existed under that name.
And that raised another red flag: she only knew the year she was born. No month, no date.
“She’s traumatized, clearly.” The doctor shook his head and rubbed a headache loose from his temple. “She can’t tell us where she’s from, who she lived with, why she ran off.... System’s going to have one hell of a time placing her, when she gets out of here. Let’s hope she remembers more soon.”
I shook my head. “We’ll take her home.”
Dad and Howard stared at me like I was speaking in tongues.
“Van,” Dad laughed, his voice twisted up in knots, “I don’t think—”
“If they can’t find her family,” I corrected, “or if she doesn’t remember anything by the time they release her. Dad, come on. We can’t leave her here alone.”
No matter what you say, I’m not leaving her here alone.
A few days later, they released her into Dad’s temporary custody.
“You’re her foster brother,” he said in the truck on our way to get her. “Don’t try a damn thing with that girl, Van, you hear me?”
I rolled my eyes. “God, Dad, have a little faith.”
He just snorted.
Okay, so I wasn’t innocent when it came to girls. I broke hearts a little too easily, and let my dick make decisions my brain didn’t want to deal with.
But Juniper wasn’t a girl.
And I wasn’t her foster brother.
I was her protector.
She was the thing that could fix me. Whatever I had to do to keep her safe, I would. No danger would come within five feet of her. Especially not the old, broken me.
We helped her into the truck from her wheelchair. She nodded silently to the backseat when we offered her the passenger one.
“Back here?” I asked, heartbeat dinging around my head. “With me?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and smiled.
That was the first real flutter of happiness—actual, honest-to-God joy—I’d felt in years.
Howard called her a miracle. Dad called her a sprite, because of how she flitted and floated through the house undetected.
I didn’t know what to call her.
A fallen satellite I was convinced had tracked my every move from above for years, before crashing to earth to nudge me back on whatever path I was supposed to take.
A ghost, born right from the darkness to lure me into the light.
Maybe even an angel, if stuff like that really existed.
Of course I knew Juniper Summers was a girl. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be any of those other things, too.
In fact, that’s what I liked most about her: how completely unaware she was of her own specialness. She was sent to me for a reason, and she didn’t even know it.
Those early days felt drawn-out and stunning, the way all summers should. We spent our mornings wandering the ranch, afternoons listening to music in the barn, and evenings on the rocking chairs on our porch while the sunset melted around us. We talked a lot, even if I did most of it.
I taught her everything I could about this world she’d crashed into from God knew where. She started to fix me, totally oblivious to the fact every smile or sentence she gave chipped a little more ice off my heart.
I didn’t know why, but I knew better than to question it. All I cared about was that I could feel something again.
Dad talked about the end of the summer a lot: Juniper returning home with us, and attending my private school with me. I told her we could go to college together.
I told myself, I’m never giving you up.
Then, slowly, things changed.
She decided she didn’t want to stay in the farmhouse with us. She liked the carriage house, she said, even though it was just a glorified garage where Dad housed some junkers he’d never restore. No amount of protests from me and my watchdog eyes could convince her the farmhouse was best.
Surrounded by her string lights and chirping darkness, she stayed out there every night, on an army cot from Howard. Her window was visible from mine, and I caught myself watching it too often. I hated those swaying little bulbs for replacing me—standing sentinel at her nightmares, when I couldn’t.
She grew quieter. Distant. Every time a hint about her old life floated to the surface, five or ten lies seemed to follow.
Day by day, I watched her lose that specialness. I wondered if I was really meant to protect her...or protect myself from her.
The day before she vanished, I caught her kissing my father in the doorway of his bedroom.
She saw me. He didn’t.
The next morning, she was nowhere to be found, along with several of my dad’s credit cards. A new skateboard arrived on the porch, though, shipped to my name.
We found the cards that afternoon—right in the middle of Captain’s old stable. Cash advances had been taken out on every single one.
Most of the clothes and electronics my father bought her were stacked neatly on her stripped cot. Howard and Dad left it all untouched, thinking she’d come back.
Three nights later, I went out to that carriage house and threw it all to the ground. Back to the dust she treated it as.
Here’s the thing about angels.
Ever wonder why shepherds and wise men avert their eyes, when one rolls down to earth? Curious as to why grown men fall to their knees in an angel’s presence, driven to screams of horror and drowning in their own tears?
Why angels always greet humans with a warning to not be afraid?
It’s because angels are hideous.
They’re not stunning, otherworldly versions of humans: they’re monsters. Literally. Hundreds of eyes, grotesque forms.
In fact, only when an angel falls does it start to look more like us.
Four
Present Day
Little-known fact about Van Durham-Andresco: when he cares about you, he will protect you with everything he has.
And if you do anything to lose his trust…you’ll get a scorn just as fierce, immoveable, and wholehearted as you once got his protection.
I’m feeling the full power of that scorn right now. Much as I may deserve it, I hate the feeling it gives me. Like I’m nothing.
No—like he’s determined to make me into nothing.
“Contrary to what you still want to believe,” I huff, out of breath as we reach the road that strangles the base of the mountain, “I didn’t sleep with your father.”
“Right. Just shoved your tongue in his mouth. Guess I’ll give you some credit, there: fucking his face with yours is better than literally fucking him.”
“That wasn’t what it....”
No. I’m not going to cry.
And I’m definitely not going to defend my actions to a guy who wouldn’t believe me, anyway.
“All right,” he says, tossing his skateboard onto the ground and hopping on, skidding circles around me as I walk, “let’s say you weren’t Frenching my dad the morning before you took off. Let’s say I didn’t catch your eye when you pulled away, looking horrified at what you’d done—another small bone of credit I’ll throw you, by the way: that you seemed even semi-remorseful—but that you still had the nerve to walk right past me without one damn explanation.”
He clasps his hands in front of him as he drags to a stop, spraying gravel into my shins.
“Ignoring all that,” he says, “let’s discuss how you stole thousa
nds of dollars from the guy who took you in when you had nowhere else to go. The guy who believed you when you kept up that amnesia bullshit for weeks, even after I called you out on it. My dad tried so hard to help you, Fairy Lights. And how did you repay him?”
My eyes shut, fighting the sting.
Too late. Hot, shameful tears squeeze onto my lashes.
“Okay, yes,” I blurt, “I took the money. And I feel awful about that. I feel horrible, knowing he blamed you.”
“You set it up so he’d have to blame me.”
Van gets off the board and kicks it up into his hands with a violent kind of grace. Like a ballet dancer, but one determined to test the strength of everything in his radius. Especially me.
“Nice touch, by the way,” he says. “Leaving me that little parting gift.”
More tears hit. More shame.
“I was just buying myself time,” I whisper now, choking on the truth. “I knew he’d wonder if it was you, but I didn’t think he’d actually blame you. The skateboard, the stables...it was supposed to confuse him long enough so I could get away without cops coming after me. That’s all. Once he realized I was gone, I figured it would all click. I mean...you’re his son. I was a stranger, I was—”
“The mysterious, innocent, brain-damaged little thing that whored her way under his skin?” Van cocks one eyebrow and shifts his helmet to his other hand, letting it dangle like a mace I know he’d never use.
He’s done protecting me. I ruined that chance a long, long time ago. He no longer cares if this world hurts me.
But I also know he’d still never do it himself. Not physically, at least.
“I promise you, Van: it wasn’t like that.” My hands drop to my sides, explanations running dry. “There’s nothing more I can give you than my word. Yes, I stole the money. But I wasn’t kissing your dad. Not…like you think.”
“Hmm. Okay. I guess that’s just normal, then, wherever the hell you’re from: totally platonic spit-swaps with men decades older than you.”
He stalks ahead. Not completely out of sight, but far enough that I know we’re no longer walking together.
Seven Sins: Durham Boys, Book 2 Page 3